Cleaning Up

I received unexpected contact with a second cousin of Papa’s the other day. This does not happen too often, so I was surprised. I was doubly surprised that our new cousin asked permission to use a photo that was posted on my Find-a-Grave site. It was not my photo, it was one that a kind researcher had posted for me. Those details attended to, I headed off to my database to see what it told me about this branch of the family.

When I checked my files, I found that I had a few pieces on information on the cousin’s family that I could share. But (why am I always a but?) I also noticed that a source reference in my database seemed a little strange. The detail text in the citation matched the event being sourced, but the title of the source included the name of someone from a completely different family. What?

I ended up typing the information to send to our new cousin, and the came back to the task at hand. It turned out that 301 death and obituary citations were linked to a single source in my database source list. The saving grace is that the detail text seems to be correct for the events in question. I use RootsMagic, so it was simple for me to print just the citations linked to that source.

You all probably know what I am doing now, right? Right. I am going into every citation using this source and creating a new correct source. Then I am copying the detail text over to the new citation, and deleting the old one. I will be doing this for a while, long enough to get discouraged. Perhaps I will get faster at it as I go along, I sure hope so!

The good news is that I can fill one more line out for descendents of Papa’s great-grandparents, John Foreman and Mary “Polly” Ziegler. So, this is a limited happy dance, but a happy dance all the same.